All the Days And Nights

– All this time it’s been sitting in his house. All this time.

In your wonderment you soaked everything up, as you used to do when you first saw my paintings. You still had interest in those, but not the sense of wonder as now overtook you with Ben’s photographs. I knew, because something similar had happened to me many years before. I saw a Modigliani portrait hanging in an alcove of a Chicago museum during a college trip and I felt my mind unlock. It has felt as if the last three years has been a slow period of unlocking, of opening yourself up to new possibilities and closing your mind to me. I do not say this from a sense of jealousy. I have often lain awake wondering how this life would ever nourish you, how sitting like a statue day in and out could ever be enough. I took you at your word when you said it was; took heart in how fast your legs ran around the meadow; how rosy your cheeks had become from eating good home-cooked food; the pride you had in being known and respected among the community, whatever they may have thought of me; but most of all because of the trust you had in my hands as they posed you and the nodded appreciation at the end of each day when you saw the progress made on the canvas; how even my stolid snail’s pace still felt like some form of magic. You have spoiled me over the years with your patience and blind faith; whether this was something I encouraged in you or that simply lay inert in your personality, waiting to be drawn out. Either way, it has made me fat and somewhat complacent. I was like a suburban wife who believed she was enough for her husband; that he would never stray elsewhere. Now I am suspicious, mistrustful, as she might be after being wronged; bitterness staining her tongue. You have given yourself up so readily and for so long, I don’t know how else to be. Your face is puffy with all the secrets you hold, the lining around the eyes tight as you hold them all in. When I am cleaning up I sometimes catch you out of the corner of my eye, staring at the paintings as if you want to burn them. Who planted the seed for that, Ben or I? I move as you do, by stealth, forcing lightness into my heavy legs as I tiptoe across the floorboards so as not to wake those below. The room is dark but never completely black. Black is for those who refuse to see color, even the red of their eyelids as they close. The hook on the back of your door where the camera used to hang is unadorned. I feel it as I push it open, hearing nothing knock against the wood on the other side. For most of the day I had been caught up thinking about your clothes, forgetting that if you left carrying your camera you would have all you need. So much about today has been about remembering and forgetting. The rigor of the studio shields me from the worst of it. Only at night do I lapse. Even as I open your wardrobe and pat my hands along its varnished floor, I know that my fingertips will find no resistance; that your slim box of photographs will be gone. The only picture left in the room should be where it always was, in a frame on your dresser. There were never any paintings here, only this. Still feeling my way, I pat up and around until I find it, hoping that this will have been taken too; that there is room for this one photograph in a stack of many. But as I stand by the window and shake the frame open, I see that it is still there, a happiness you no longer wish to remember; of us in our evening finery taken at the reception in London.

I WATCH THE DARKNESS fade shivering on the porch, wrapped in two of the thickest blankets we saved for winter. I think of the bachelor party they threw for the farmer’s son not so many years ago: how the lot of you raised hell over three towns and the outskirts of the city before a chastened return on the first morning train. I remember hearing of you all stumbling down Main Street at sunrise; an army of penitents. And then a memory of you alone, walking with uncertainty through the meadow toward the house. You were benignly drunk, the strengthening sunlight pushing through your greasy hair and making an angel of you. How you slept where I am sitting now, on a love seat no bigger than a cot, because you did not want to wake the house. It is foolish of me to expect you to reappear in the same way, as night rescinds and morning beckons, but I do so. Like a young woman I rehearse how I am going to look and what to say. In reality, of course, we will have nothing to say to each other. A look will pass between us, something that can reassure the other that there is no animosity, and then only sleep, from which your cheerfulness will return.

– You should have seen the size of them. Twenty in all, and of a height to make our farm-bred boys look minute. Fed on bad manners and smog, thighs for arms from all the lifting on the docks. Put one of them next to one of us and we looked as unstable as a skittle. And boy were they ready to knock us down! Didn’t like the look of us or the way we spoke. That we could be drunk and still be mindful of our manners. They weren’t used to so many smiling faces in that miserable place. I can’t recall how we even ended up there, save the neon sign calling us, with its promise of beer and can-can girls. The only thing that saved us getting a beating outside that bar was that our legs were not solid like hams. We could run faster. One of us – I can’t remember who, but it could have been me just as easily as the next man – tipped up a table to give us a head start, and we piled through that tiny door and out into the street as quick as we could. We were like anchovies being pulled from a jar; as ungainly. The air was salty, thick with our sweat. The sound of glasses and bottles masked their threats toward us for a merciful few seconds. And in one of those, at least, they were cut silent, the sudden move surprising them more than they could articulate. They had not banked on Hicksville country mice using their wits. We ran through the docks, fast in our pack, pounding hard until our feet were sore and chests fit to bursting with effort. Their voices carried past the few warehouses but their feet didn’t follow. They didn’t have the energy for it, not when there was still beer to drink, and stony-faced women to heckle. Which reminds me, the neon did not live up to its promise. These were definitely not girls. Faces and necks crisscrossed with lines, powder and lipstick thickly lodged in every crevice; breasts and bellies sagging from bearing children; eyes as dark and hard as flint. They were nothing like the girls we were thinking of, which was a sign of our ignorance of what such a bar should be like. Even though you have made me see things as they really are, when I was with the guys all I could think of was the ideal. How funny is that? The only thing I’m sure of is that you would have wanted to stay if you had come along. You would have painted every single one of them. In the midst of our running, I emerged at the front, escaping that fear I have of being hemmed in, I suppose. I found myself leading the boys past one warehouse after another until I got a rough sense of direction from the lights far up on the Lower East Side glittering on the Hudson. That too became something to run from, another place I only wanted to remember as an ideal. My heart was beating fast, both from the running and the fear that one of the guys would ask why we weren’t running uptown, where drinks and girls would be plenty. The double-rush of adrenaline made me feel drunker than before. I was dizzy with it, so light-headed, to the point where I thought my brain would float away, leaving just a pair of running legs and this urgent heartbeat. But nothing was said. We were all overtaken with running; the strength and enjoyment of it. Our feet and breath became harmonized, and if someone had suggested we run all the way home, we were all of the presence of mind to possibly attempt it. Once we left the dockside, uncertainty sat in the air, but I was still at the front, still being followed. I kept my eyes ahead. We passed the factory where my father worked his whole life but I stayed fixed on the street. I didn’t turn my head at the chimneys that used to fascinate me as a kid. Nor at the gated entrance where I would wait for him at the end of the day and where the vans delivering raw hides from all over the city passed. I never stopped. They all ran with my fear on their shoulders. Their muscles ached with it. Only as we reached the bridge did I slow, relishing in the boundary before me; knowing that once I was in Brooklyn I could not be touched. I could drink in Brooklyn. Breathe, and be my own man. Feel that he wasn’t standing over my shoulder. So I spent the last money I had getting the boys even more drunk and ridding myself of that feeling. With every glass I felt lighter, lighter.

I stayed in the cot and kept lookout.

BEN REMAINS PERFECTLY STILL, though his restlessness shows in his eyes. They roam. Vishni has given him a plate of eggs, followed by fruit; a menu designed to banish tiredness and prevent bloating in morning subjects, and it would please her to see how he ripples with energy. The tremors across his eyebrows crackle with it. He hesitates to speak, not wanting to disturb my concentration, a mood I silently encourage. Unhappy with the previous day’s work, I fix him in a variety of poses until I find something I am happy with. The easy chair is dragged back to the corner. Now he is naked on the blanket, lying on his side, his knees pulled halfway toward his chest, as if he is in the process of curling or uncurling; paralyzed by sleep were it not for the strength of his eyes. He makes no complaint about the discomfort of his position. The thin foam mattress under the blanket is deeply pocked in places, so that the floor’s chill can be felt. The draft from the open window ruffles his hair and the thin tangle of curls across his prick and balls. At the completion of each sketch, where line and form takes precedence over other details, I have him up on his feet to regain his circulation. I use the exercises that you are so familiar with, and at various times, contemptuous of. Body stretches from top to toe, followed by a couple of minutes’ jogging on the spot, as much as my condition will allow. He does as you used to at the beginning, laughing heartily and with some disbelief as I join in with him; someone who notoriously showed little interest in most physical activity.